I will always cherish that relationship with you, even given the circumstances that pushed us together.
My goal was always a simple one: to bring you answers to your tragedy, and, in some cases, bring your lost loved ones home.
When I was in charge of the task force into missing persons or unsolved homicides in 1997, I came up with a motto which we hung in our office: Gone But Not Forgotten.
All of my detectives were committed to that.
This motto was carried on when I started the first Cold Case Squad in the Halifax Regional Police in 2000.
I always tried to ensure each and every one of your cases received equal attention. There are cases that have stayed with me with more resilience than others, due largely to my dealings with you, the families.
You know who you are.
To all the families of lost loved ones whose cases I dealt with, I apologize, and I will forever carry the guilt that I [have] let you down, and I was not able to give all of you the answers you so desperately wanted and needed.
I don’t use the word “closure” because I personally don’t believe there ever is any closure when a loved one is lost, either to violence or otherwise. But you all deserve answers.
I want you all to know that I, and I know other investigators as well, will forever carry the burden of not giving you the answers to your tragedies, and that I think almost daily of your cases, and wonder what else I could have done, and what else can still be done to make some sense out of senseless acts.
As with you, your tragedy will be with me always.
If I can give any advice to you, it would be: never give up hope of getting the answers you so deserve. Police agencies react to public pressure. Never let them forget who you are and who your loved one was.
7
Kate Lines: From Patrol Cop to Profiler
Sixty-year-old Kate Lines has been part of some of the most high-profile missing persons or murder cases in Canada, including the abduction and murder of Kristen French in Ontario, as well as the disappearance of Michael Dunahee in British Columbia.
Kate was a member of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) for more than three decades, rising through the ranks from a uniformed patrol officer to chief superintendent. When she retired in 2010, she was in charge of the OPP’s Investigation and Support Bureau with more than 500 uniform and civilian employees working on major criminal investigations. She also played a critical role as officer in charge of “researching, developing, and implementing Canada’s sex offender registry,” according to a 2013 media report. She is now a licensed private investigator specializing in workplace harassment and violence and human rights investigations.
Kate broke major ground in policing as Canada’s first female criminal profiler. She said, as of 2016, there were four female criminal profilers in Canada, including her, with the other three being employed by the OPP. She estimates there are about one dozen profilers working across the country.
Kate is intelligent, witty, and does not mince words. I admired her immediately when we met in Vaughn, Ontario, near Toronto, in February 2016. We were invited to speak about our writing and work at a symposium for first responders in Canada called Common Threads, presented by the Tema Conter Memorial Trust, a leading non-profit support and educational group in Canada for first responders, emergency personnel, members of the military, and their loved ones. She was one of two keynote speakers at the event. The second was Halifax Police Chief Jean-Michel Blais.
Kate joined the OPP in 1977, when women in policing were still a relatively uncommon sight. In her book, Crime Seen: From Patrol Cop to Profiler, My Stories From Behind The Yellow Tape, Kate explained what the environment was like for a fledgling female officer. “Although about fifty women had already been hired by the OPP since 1974, there was no uniform available in my size. Until one could be made, I wore men’s extra-small blue shirts and pants that I had to cinch up so much at the waist that the red stripe down the sides spiralled around my legs.”
That type of candour and humour also permeated her speech. But what really captured the audience’s attention at the conference in Vaughn, and what is also compelling in her book, is what Lines accomplished during 1990-1991.
In September 1990, the young OPP officer travelled to Quantico, Virginia, to study at the FBI Academy, not far from Washington, D.C. She had applied for a new position within the OPP: according to her book, “the successful candidate [was] required to attend a violent crime course hosted by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at the FBI Academy …”
The training, people she met, and experiences she had while at the FBI have collectively altered the course of her life and career. “I was going to be trained to be a criminal personality profiler … whatever that was,” she wrote.
Kate was not the only person who had limited working knowledge about criminal profiling back then. The public was also unaware of the concept, for the most part, but had its curiosity peaked after a blockbuster Hollywood movie about the FBI, Quantico, and criminal profiling premiered when Lines was studying there.
The Silence of the Lambs was released in February 1991. The movie starred Jodi Foster, who played Clarice Starling, a junior FBI agent in training at Quantico, and Anthony Hopkins, in the role of imprisoned serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Starling seeks Lecter’s advice while the FBI tries to hunt down another serial killer dubbed Buffalo Bill. During the opening scenes, Agent Starling is seen running through the trails at Quantico, which was shot on location. The movie grossed a staggering $272 million worldwide and was a smash hit, impressive because it was made on a $19 million budget. People were mesmerized by the performances, characters, direction, and concept of criminal profiling used to ultimately capture Buffalo Bill.
Kate was studying with the FBI in a class with six other police officers from around the globe when the buzz about both the movie and profiling was at its height. Lines told the conference in Vaughn the movie “helped her career because people were inquisitive” about profiling afterwards. The other officers, five men and one woman, were from the United States, Australia, and Holland. She was the only Canadian. At that time, she was just the second police officer in Canada to be trained in criminal profiling by the FBI.
“It was the worst of the worst of man’s inhumanity to man, in what we were dealing with in the FBI,” she said at the Vaughn conference. It was at Quantico when she first heard about resilience and coping skills and the effects of stress on a person involved with trauma and violent crime.
One of the coping skills she still uses is to refer to offenders by their surname only, while she refers to the victims and their loved ones using their first names. Throughout our interview, she always referred to people this way.
“You have some belief systems or thoughts that you do, or aspects of your personality that you never really talk about, until you start to write and explain yourself. Like, if you said ‘Paul Bernardo’ to me right now, I would say ‘Bernardo’ back to you. I would not use his first name. To me, a first name is deserving of a victim, because they’re the innocent. They’re the ones that we should feel compassion for and the ones you use the last name [of] are the ones who deserve no compassion, they deserve no notoriety, and I don’t want to like them because they’re the ‘bad guy.’ So you got to get through your day somehow, so that was just one of the stupid little things I did, but I think that helped,” she explained.
I asked the retired superintendent about the after-effects of more than three decades of being around highly violent and dangerous offenders and investigations, including those that remain unsolved:
JL: “Does it linger [the cases]?”
KL: “No, it doesn’t. Not as long as I know I did everything that I could [to try to solve it]. Whether it’s a doctor with a sick child [saying], ‘We did everything we could to try and do our jobs; the best we possibly could.’ I wouldn’t feel that way if I gave something a half-hearted effort. Doing these types of cases is n
ot a half-assed job. It’s a fully engaged job. The compartmentalization is: How do you measure success?” she explained.
That explanation is reminiscent of a key exchange Kate was witness to at Quantico while training with the FBI. She and her classmates trained at the Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU). There they met and were instructed by some of the most esteemed experts and specialized FBI investigators on the planet, including then Unit Chief John Douglas, a globally respected criminal profiler and best-selling author, Supervisory Special Agent Roy Hazelwood, who was one of her primary instructors, and world-renowned child abuse expert Ken Lanning, who, Kate wrote, was brought in “to teach the behavioral aspects of sexual exploitation, abduction, abuse and other crimes related to children. Ken was already recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in this field of victimization that he has dedicated his career to since 1973.”
Kate has referred to a very specific conversation with Ken Lanning more than a dozen times over the course of her lengthy career. The conversation was between Lanning, the child exploitation expert, and a group of Canadian investigators who had travelled to Quantico for help on the widely reported unsolved missing person’s case of Michael Dunahee, then a four-year-old boy from Victoria, British Columbia.
Michael disappeared on March 24, 1991, at 12:30 p.m. He was with his parents and baby sister at a school sports field where his mother, Crystal, was supposed to play touch football. Michael asked his parents if he could go to the children’s play area on the side of the school, which was in plain sight of the field and no more than a hundred metres away. It was the first time his parents had allowed him to go to the playground alone, according to Lines, who travelled to British Columbia to interview Michael’s family for her book. The boy was instructed not to wander off and to stay where his parents could see him at all times.
Michael set off for the playground as his mother got ready to play and his father, Bruce, settled his baby sister, Caitlin, into her stroller. Bruce stepped up onto a large rock to have a better view of Michael.
Less than one minute had passed.
When Bruce looked over towards the play area, Michael was not visible.
Word quickly spread that Michael was missing. The game was immediately stopped and people started to help with the search. A neighbour was asked to call the Victoria Police Department.
“By morning it has turned into a search by over a hundred officers for a little boy who has surely been abducted. Michael, three feet tall … blond hair, blue eyes, freckles on his cheeks, and wearing his favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt, was never seen again,” Lines wrote in her book, stating, “Michael Dunahee’s disappearance rocked Victoria and the wave of anxiety and anguish it created quickly spread across Canada.”
It was the British Columbia detectives, nine of them from several different provincial police agencies, who flew to Quantico for the FBI’s help in finding Michael.
Kate requested to be involved in the Dunahee investigation because it was the first case from Canada being reviewed by the FBI when she was there for training. “That was the first Canadian case I was looking at through the lens of a profiler in training,” she said. She went to the airport to pick up the investigators. “I remember them getting off the plane and they had banker’s boxes, and they had briefcases, and the tubes that would have maps, photographs, and that sort of thing. They were bringing the whole case to the FBI to see if there was anything they might have missed, for a new approach to the case, whatever [could assist in finding the boy].”
She will not discuss any of the FBI consultation because the case remains open. Michael has never been found. But she will say the investigators left with a possible Unknown Offender Profile and investigative suggestions following the consultation. She also explained the gut-wrenching circumstances faced by the FBI investigator assigned to be the case lead.
“The [FBI] agent who was assigned … who was responsible for the western U.S. … got the [Dunahee] case file because he could do western Canada, too … but he had just come back to work because his three-year-old daughter had died and he had been on bereavement leave. This was his first case coming back,” Kate explained. “I went and interviewed him [for the book]. His wife was pregnant when his daughter was very ill. She [the ill child] had a heart defect. But it [the child’s passing] was still unexpected [as] she was just having some surgery.”
On the day the FBI agent’s baby daughter was born in one hospital, his other daughter died in another medical facility. The investigator had to go back and forth between two hospitals to deal with the two extremes in his family’s life on the exact same day.
“[There was] one year difference in the age of the child he’s just lost [and Michael]. I asked him [how he did it] … and he said his faith got him through that,” said Kate.
Despite his own anguish, and the fact the first case he worked after his daughter’s death involved a young child similar in age, the investigator and his peers pressed on to help the B.C. officers.
The initial few weeks of the Dunahee disappearance and investigation had taken a toll on the Canadians who visited Quantico. Kate took them to meet Ken Lanning.
She wrote about what happened. “They presented all the evidence gathered over the last twenty-nine days in the case, and at the end of their presentation, there was a good understanding of victimology, the abduction location and neighbourhood demographics. There had been no eyewitnesses. There was no physical evidence. But for the person who took Michael, there had been a high risk of being seen.”
The initial twenty-nine days of trying to find Michael, without success, had affected the investigators. “They were really hurting. You could tell they were just exhausted – so tired, so disappointed. It was just like they had the weight of the world on their shoulders. They just needed that pep talk that Ken Lanning gave them,” Kate remarked. The pep talk with Lanning is something she clearly remembers and has used and referenced many times in her life and work.
At the end of the FBI consultation, the British Columbia investigators were starting to pack up their boxes and briefcases when Ken Lanning asked them to sit back down. She said he had only been with the Canadians that one day, but he was highly perceptive about the officers’ collective fatigue, concern, and frustration.
Kate wrote in her book, and discussed with me, what Ken Lanning said to the Canadians. “‘Just listen to one more thing I have to say. There will come a time when this case will end for you … All leads will have been followed up, and in the end, the person responsible for what happened to Michael Dunahee may never be found. Michael may never be found.’ The room was silent. ‘If that is what happens, you are still great police officers who did a great job. You are doing everything you can to solve this case. You will never let down the public, the Dunahee family or Michael. Remember that, please.’”
She added, “The thing I admire about Ken … [He] is a guy who has worked all over the world doing cases and training and that kind of thing. But you could tell, he obviously sensed in these officers, I won’t say despair, but it was fatigue and frustration. They’re just so afraid they’re going to make a mistake. They wanted a new set of eyes. ‘Did we miss something?’ ‘Is there something we could have done or can do?’ History is history. ‘Is there anything we could do that you can see?’ They were very open to new ideas and they were provided with some new ideas. Not that they made any mistakes, but they left with what they came for; there were some things that potentially could advance their investigation.”
She interviewed Ken Lanning for her book and he told his former student he has no recollection, whatsoever, of his conversation with the Canadians as they packed up to leave.
It is ironic, because what he had said has affected Kate so much that “I gave that talk probably fifteen times throughout my career, because I’d seen the effect it had when Ken [did it],” Kate said. “I don’t proclaim to say it verbatim, but basically, they’re packing up all their stuff. There was
some enthusiasm because they had some new ideas, but obviously he [Lanning] could detect fatigue and frustration. That consultation was probably four to five hours long. Everybody’s tired at the end of the day.”
It is unfathomable to truly comprehend the pain, for everyone involved, when people touched by crime and trauma, especially the families, never get the answers they deserve. That is, sadly, the harsh reality for many. Michael Dunahee would be thirty years old in 2017. He has been missing for twenty-six years.
The lingering questions over his west coast disappearance and whereabouts have impacted countless people, just like Kimberly McAndrew’s case on Canada’s east coast, and the thousands of missing person’s cases in between.
We often think about the victims and their loved ones, and rightly so. But we may not always think about the counsellors, social workers, first responders, teachers, forensic experts, medical staff, and many others who dedicate themselves, at all costs, to helping the families of the dead, injured, or missing. A solution does not always come and its impact has a profound ripple effect. “The anxiety of a missing child never goes away,” Kate said.
Kate talked about several investigations during both our interview and at the Common Threads conference. She told the crowd of two hundred that, after decades of working as an officer, “Everybody’s problems [of trying to lead a typical life] seem so trivial.” For example, she addressed the people she routinely meets who complain about their teenage children coming home late. “Well, at least your kids come home.” The conference crowd went silent. People nodded in agreement.
She told the audience she felt “so guilty” when, later in her career, she finally realized she could not work in the manner she had been anymore.
“When I was at work, I could handle anything,” she said.
The Legacy Letters Page 9